Stephen King has written twenty-six novels (including five under the pen name Richard Bachman), five collections of short fiction, one book of criticism, six screenplays, and other short works. According to Stephen J. Spignesi in The Shape Under the Sheet: The Complete Stephen King Encyclopedia (1991), which details King's work up to 1990, King is best known as a best-selling novelist: "Of the top twenty-five Publishers Weekly fiction best-sellers of the eighties, Stephen King had seven titles on the list: The Dark Half, The Tommyknockers, IT, Misery, The Talisman, The Eyes of the Dragon , and Skeleton Crew. The twenty-five titles on the list sold a combined total of 25,889,924 copies. Of that total, 7,269,929 -- or twenty-eight percent -- were Stephen King titles." However, while he earned his reputation as a writer of genre fiction, especially of horror and fantasy, and remains identified as such, many of King's recent novels might be classified as mainstream fiction.
